On the average day, Hugh Pocock burns just under half of the 8 pounds of food he eats and wastes the rest.
The process of uncovering this specific bit of information about his own machinery may not be breakfast conversation. It involved meticulous weighing of all that went in his mouth and all that came out the other end for 63 days, calculating the difference and logging the findings.
Pocock was not getting even with his wife for nagging him about leaving the seat up. Nor was he responding badly to potty-training his son. An artist and professor at Maryland Institute College of Art, he wanted to learn specifically what it takes to fuel his body and, more globally, explore man's relationship to the production of energy and the use and waste of natural resources. He's displaying his findings at the Contemporary Museum in an exhibit called My Food My Poop.
At the risk of disappointing teenage boys everywhere, Pocock did not save any of the samples for the show. The food, waste and energy are all represented by wood blocks in weights that correspond to the actual food, waste and energy. They can be handled and compared in a room at the museum lighted by bulbs burning solar energy collected by a panel on the building.
"I really became aware of what it takes to fuel my daily life," he said. "A week I cut out carbs for Passover, my energy equivalent went way down. ...When I was working on sawing the wood blocks, my intake went way up. I've become aware of our intimate relationship with energy."
Irene E. Hofmann, executive director of the Contemporary Museum, said she was instantly interested in exhibiting Pocock's findings, even before she knew exactly how he would present them.
She was pretty sure he wouldn't use the museum as a personal bathroom, she said with a giggle. Now she delights in handing museum visitors the blocks of wood, which are oak, maple and locust recycled from a city stump dump.
"They're surprisingly heavy, aren't they?" she said. "They make you think about where energy comes from and how much we use."
Hofmann has paired Pocock's exhibit with another along similar lines. Called The Reverse Ark, it refers to the biblical story of Noah's Ark and the effort to save the animal kingdom from flood. The San Francisco-based Futurefarmers, an artists' collective, found items discarded around Baltimore that exemplify what the community might want to preserve and used them to build a new "ark" to withstand the modern threat of global warming and rising waters.
